SHEIKH - History Side Event

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Adding to the plethora of side event announcements, I would like to announce Somewhat Hard Examination of In-Depth Knowledge of History (SHEIKH), an all-history, all-tossup tournament written by myself and Jordan Brownstein. We originally intended to run this at VCU Open and we'd still prefer for it to be run there, but since there's a plethora of side events already in the works, we'd have little problem with it being run at a later date instead. In the worst case, this side event probably will be available in case one of the others does not get written.

Our target difficulty is equivalent to ACF Nationals or slightly easier, with emphasis on ensuring that answerlines are accessible in order to keep difficulty roughly in line with VCU Open and keep the tournament accessible to people playing who don't want to be subjected to CO/Oppen-level insanity and whimsy. We plan on writing ten packets, and will be using a soft cap of eight lines (including powermarks) for tossups. We will try not to go past the cap too often, in order to make the side event easier to run alongside several others in a single day.

The distribution will be as follows:

1 US History (pre-Constitution)
2 US History (Constitution to World War I)
2 US History (post-World War I)
1 Continental European history (post-classical to 1492)
1 Continental European history (1492 to 1870)
1 Continental European history (1870 to present)
1 British history (post-classical to George III)
1 British history (George III to present)
1 Commonwealth History and European Imperialism
2 Classical history
1 Historiography, Archaeology, and Ancient Near East
1 East Asian History
1 Islamic/post-Classical Middle East History
1 South and Southeast Asian History
1 non-US, non-Canada American History
1 African History
1 Additional East Asian/Islamic and Other History (Pacific Islands, treaties about Antarctica, UN stuff, what-have-you)

This distribution represents a slight increase in the amount of world history compared to the standard ACF distribution and a decrease in the amount of European history. We're hoping to give all time periods and areas of the world some degree of representation in the tournament, while staying constrained by what people actually might know.

A few tiebreaker tossups will be provided.

UPDATE 7/4/15: This set's shaping up to be a bit easier than ACF Nationals. As indicated before, we are deliberately trying to include a good number of easier answers and are hoping to not overshoot too much, but it is a side event and we will be exploring some less-trodden territory with our answers.

UPDATE 8/5/15: 209 of 200 tossups have been written. The tournament is 100% complete.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

If there's sufficient interest later in the summer, I wouldn't mind hosting a free to very low cost reading of this via Skype for people who aren't heading out to one of the VCU Open sites.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Since Jordan's written a convenient script to count how much we've written, I'll update the OP occasionally about how complete the tournament is. We're just under two months out and the set is 30% complete thus far. You can almost certainly expect on-time completion now that Jordan's clear of his other writing commitments and I've put other projects on hold.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

The tournament is half completed. I've updated the OP to reflect some time-related specifications we've made with the distribution.

[theMoMA]

How much will the entry fee be?

[naan/steak-holding toll]

The fee is $10 per person.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

The set's been fully written and packetized - we're just making minor changes at this point. If you're planning on hosting this weekend, email me and I'll send the packets along Friday evening.

[Important Bird Area]

A private forum now exists for discussion of this set.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

If people who were at the main site but weren't involved in or listening to the finals are interested, I'll read Finals 1 and Finals 2 in the IRC room #sheikh tomorrow. I'll plan for 9PM Eastern Time if that's OK with everyone.

EDIT: This will now happen at 10PM instead.

EDIT 2: I'll be reading Packet 8 as well, since I don't think that got read to most teams at most sites; correct me if this isn't the case.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

The IRC reading is happening now. We'll do Packet 8, then Finals 1 and 2.

[1.82]

Final scores:

Packet 8
Michael Wacha 5/5/2 115
Doug Graebner 2/3/1 55
Dan Puma 3/1/2 45
Susan Ferrari 1/0/0 15

Finals 1
Matt Bollinger 3/3/1 70
Doug Graebner 4/0/0 60
Dan Puma 1/2/1 30
Matt Lafer 2/0/1 25
Alston Boyd 1/1/0 25
Sam Rombro 0/1/0 10
Chris Manners 0/1/1 5
Kenji Golimlim 0/1/1 5

Finals 2
Doug Graebner 6/1/0 100
Dan Puma 3/1/1 50
Matt Bollinger 3/0/1 40
Michael Wacha 1/2/3 20
Sam Rombro 1/0/0 15
Chris Manners 1/0/0 15
Victor Prieto 1/0/3 0

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I've uploaded PDFs of the set to the database, pending approval.